Wireless devices, such as cellular telephones, PDAs, laptop computers, palmtop computers, handhelds, and others, are frequently equipped with externally audible audio playback capability, meaning audio can be heard by the naked ear at some distance away from the device. This playback is typically accomplished through use of at least one speaker. In the case of telephones, this feature is commonly referred to as “speakerphone” functionality.
Unfortunately, due to the relatively small size of cellular telephones, and their necessarily small speakers, these devices are not able to produce audio at a volume level that can be heard simultaneously by an appreciable number of people. Presently, if a user wishes to share audio with multiple users, that user is presented with two choices. The first choice is to have the other users crowd around the device. This can be uncomfortable both physically and socially.
A second choice available to a sharing user is to send an audio file to a multitude of other user's individual devices for playback on the individual devices. However, this choice suffers from several disadvantages. For instance, if an environment is desired where all users listen to the audio together, such as the playback of a song or other audio, it is currently not possible to coordinate the devices so that each user hears the audio in a single phase. If all users were able to start the audio playback at exactly the same time (which may not even be possible), each user would hear his device first and then sequentially hear the same time point in each other device's audio playback, in order of increasing distance from the user to the playback device, so as to create a muddied sound or an echo effect. Even if, alternatively, each device was able to delay or speed up its start time to compensate for distance from a central point, there is no way to account for devices that have interruptions in playback due to processor interruptions (e.g., multitasking), network or device streaming delays, slight differences in the actual start of actual audio playback due to processor variations among devices, and others.
Therefore a need exists to overcome the problems with the prior art as discussed above.